North Korea scraps military agreement with Seoul as tensions rise

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North Korea has announced that it is scrapping a package of military confidence-building measures with South Korea, as tensions mount on the Korean peninsula after Pyongyang’s successful launch of its first military spy satellite.

The inter-Korean Comprehensive Military Agreement (CMA), reached in 2018 by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s then-president Moon Jae-in during a period of intense diplomacy, was designed to reduce military tensions along the historic foes’ border.

But the pact has come under increasing strain as North Korea has made unrelenting progress on its nuclear weapons programme, while South Korea has intensified joint military exercises with the US and Japan.

Following Pyongyang’s successful launch of a military reconnaissance satellite on Tuesday night, Seoul announced it was partially suspending the 2018 accord and would resume surveillance operations closer to the demilitarised zone that separates the countries.

That move prompted Pyongyang to declare on Thursday that it would abandon the agreement altogether.

“From now on, our army will never be bound by the September 19 North-South Military Agreement,” North Korea’s Central Military Commission said, according to a statement in the Rodong Sinmun state newspaper.

“We will immediately restore all military measures that have been halted,” the statement added, warning that “the so-called ‘Republic of Korea’ will be held wholly accountable in case an irretrievable clash breaks out between the north and the south”.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service briefed lawmakers on Thursday on North Korea’s Malligyong-1 reconnaissance satellite, which had successfully reached orbit, according to South Korean state news agency Yonhap.

North Korea’s state news agency on Wednesday released images of Kim reviewing satellite images of US military installations in the Pacific, which it claimed had been captured by the satellite.

Under the CMA, the countries had pledged to “completely cease all hostile acts against each other” and instituted a series of confidence-building measures, including a ban on drills close to the inter-Korean border, restricting live-fire exercises and agreeing no-fly zones. The sides also removed some guard posts and established a military hotline.

But analysts said the agreement had been under severe strain long before the satellite launch this week, especially after the collapse of Kim’s flurry of diplomacy with then-US president Donald Trump in 2019 and South Korea’s election of conservative hardliner Yoon Suk Yeol as president last year.

Seoul has repeatedly accused Pyongyang of violating the terms of the 2018 agreement, and senior officials have increasingly questioned its purpose.

“The CMA was basically already dead,” said Go Myong-hyun, senior fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, noting that North Korea blew up a liaison office near the border in 2020.

Last week, Yoon’s nominee as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Vice-Admiral Kim Myung-soo, dismissed the CMA’s contribution to peace efforts, adding that it impaired Seoul’s ability to conduct important surveillance operations.

“We are unable to monitor the enemy’s rear in real time,” he told South Korean lawmakers.

“The CMA created a grey zone that encouraged the North Koreans to push the boundaries of what they could get away with, while hampering South Korean efforts to detect and deter their activities,” said Go, who characterised the agreement as a “series of unilateral concessions by South Korea”.

“It has irritated the South Korean military for a long time,” he said. “This South Korean government won’t be sorry to see it go.”